I hate traveling. Hate. It. Inefficient, dehumanizing, claustrophobic and uncomfortable, so many unwelcome smells. I don’t hate travel — getting out of New York now and then is a sanity-preservation necessity, and once I get wherever I need to go, I like to learn the place, see what’s different, compare approaches to coffee. But getting there, fuck it. I’d go to Bali or Johannesburg in a hot minute if I could teleport, but more than six hours on a plane, with the suitcase and the rental-car printouts and the shuffling through lines and the tray tables…good for you, if you can stand it, but no thanks.

Once it’s all over, though, and I’ve changed into an outfit that doesn’t have that vomity burnt fabric plane smell in every fiber, then it gets interesting. “Interesting” is perhaps too polite a term for the “Best” Western in which I chose to stay on this trip, but it’s my own cheapskate fault, so — “interesting” it is. The painfully slow elevator, under which I think I can hear an actual human being puffing and groaning as he hauls on the cables, is very interesting indeed. Also very interesting is the elevator alternative, the stairs, which let you out in a horror-movie-climax dark alley that manages to be dank and forbidding even at 11 on an L.A. morning. The fellow occupant of the third floor wearing a rattan visor? Extremely interesting. The voodoo involved in successfully flushing the toilet in my room is a strong candidate for the most interesting aspect of all — think “low-flow” necessarily implies a flow of any kind? Think again…and take your time with that. Getting an average-sized pee to complete its transition into the Santa Monica sewage system will take three flushes, at least, and each one will sound progressively more like that scene in A History of Violence where the guy is gargling to death in the blood of his own skull wound, as well as looking rather threatening in the manner of a tidal boil.

But in the end, possession of the interesting crown is assumed decisively by the soft rock blasting in the hall. And I do mean “blasting”; standing beside the room door, as I must in order to use the sink (…), I can hear Peabo Bryson as clearly as if he lived in my sinuses. And it’s on all the time. Six in the morning, three in the afternoon, ten-thirty at night, “af-ter-noon de-light!” Has it come to this, that as a culture we can’t manage even a few minutes of silence while walking from a hotel room to the elevator? It’s even playing in the parking garage. Here’s the thing, Christopher Cross: shut up.

I will accord an honorable mention to the mirrors in the vestibules, every last one of which makes me look like a Degas painting or a human daffodil stem. If this is designed to distract me from the soda machine’s running out of Diet Coke twice in two days, it’s…well, it’s not working, but it dropped the rating of my call to the front desk to a TV-14. Iiiiiinteresting.

I hate traveling, and I believe that, as a New Yorker, I am “supposed to” hate Los Angeles, which I don’t. I like it here. I understand why I’m supposed to hate Los Angeles, or think it’s funny to call it “Hell-Lay” (and note to the culture: stop doing that, it’s boring now), but…okay, what’s the knock on L.A.? It’s smoggy, it’s essentially unserious and everyone is slick and self-absorbed…right? And the traffic, too, is probably on the list. But for a New Yorker to complain about the pollution in L.A. is just…you can’t climb over a snow bank the color of the House of Usher while a cross-town bus is chugging past you and then get all snitty about the air quality somewhere else, is what I’m saying, and as for the traffic, I don’t think I know why Angelenos complain about it. Dudes: it’s moving. Meeting adjourned. Not that it’s fun to sit on Wilshire for forty minutes with the lights all totally unsynchronized for her pleasure, but compared to the Lincoln Tunnel approach on an average weekday evening? Please.

And the other stuff, “it’s a company town,” bah. Yeah, you see a lot more vanity plates, which are Smurfy and I’m not defending them, but you do not come home from a publishing party in New York City saying things like, “Wow, everyone was so gosh-darn genuine there!” or “You know, I got a really warm feeling from those people.” You come home complaining that you think Condé goddamn Nast of all companies could spring for a Chardonnay that doesn’t taste like Gummi peaches, and it’s just Gouda, Annie Sprinkle, so what’s with the pushing, and furthermore, what’s with that hat, this isn’t the Catskills and get off my foot. Los Angeles absolutely has That Girl who’s just A Little Much with the ponytail-tossing and the arm-warmers, don’t get me wrong — I just saw her at Starbucks, and you’d think God stopped making blondes after she came off the factory line the way she was vogueing with her water bottle — but come on, like New York doesn’t have her too? She’s just got more layers on, and a Metrocard.

Yes, I would rather live in New York, which you can tell because I…already live there, so…there it is. It’s certainly possible to draw parallels between the cosmetic differences and more profound ones that I don’t see because I don’t know the city well; maybe it’s meaningful that the stores here all have white pants as far as the eye can see, whereas in New York, where the subway is going to eat those pants alive, each store has the one pair of white pants that they keep in stock in case a customer is going to Miami on business. If Joan Didion is based in New York thirty years ago, she’s a different writer. We don’t bother with Uggs back east. All true. But in both places, mostly it’s just people trying to work the day out. I went into a sports memorabilia store next to the 7-Eleven yesterday, just to pass the time, and I saw a Kevin Brown card selling for $50, and before I knew it I’d burst out with, “Fifty bucks? You should pay me fifty bucks to take it,” and then the counter guy and I did a little shtick together about how he could probably get $75 if he Sharpied a mustache on it and stuff. Yankee fans in Dodger country, making the best of things, but you have to find a way to talk to each other no matter where you live. We all saw Crash; this isn’t a geography issue.

The one thing I kind of can’t get into is the estrangement from walking. “You parked three blocks awa– but there’s a lot right here!” “But I saw that space, so –” “But there’s a lot right here! Right here.” “Well, I saw that –” “Right here, dude.” And when I walked to the 7-Eleven? It’s four blocks, which in Santa Monica can mean it’s a mile plus, but I could see it from the corner outside the hotel so I walked it, why not, it’s a nice day out. Well, first of all, I was the only gainfully employed and recently showered person on the sidewalk, pretty much, and one of three people who didn’t have a cardboard sign boiling my personal tragedy down to ten words or fewer. Second of all, people in cars were staring at me. Third, I slipped on, I shit you not, a banana peel. There was a banana peel on the sidewalk; it was brown, so I just didn’t really see it; my heel came down on it, and I almost fell.

A banana peel, people! “Dear Sarah: Last warning. We don’t walk here; figure it out. Love, Southern California.” Got it, chief.

I like it fine here. I like that the Gap has different stuff from back home. I like the Jamba-Juice-J.-Crew hive mind I have with Wing — well, except for the part where I always drink it too fast, get a brain freeze, and have to lie down and moan in the middle of the Promenade while Wing politely explains to passersby that “actually, we prefer the term ‘delayed'” and Glark wanders off to take pictures of the bed cult. (I’ll let him tell the story.)

But it strikes me how much parts of Santa Monica look like New Jersey, and it strikes me mainly because this has struck me before, all over North America — how much of it looks like analogous parts of New Jersey. (This is, for the purposes of clarity, a value-neutral statement, not an insult.) Santa Monica Boulevard at 17th looks like Scotch Plains. Grimsby, Ontario looks like East Windsor. Bloomfield Hills, Michigan looks like Chatham. Maybe it explains why everyone’s got to bag on the Jerz all the time? A “what you hate most in other people is what you hate most in yourself” kind of thing happening where the residents of Jupiter, Florida realize that their town looks like Lavallette and they just have to lash out?

February 8, 2006

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